Virtuality Is Reality  Andy Dolich

The four major professional sports leagues, NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL, are running out of new revenue sources. Premium seating, suites and season tickets are increasingly more difficult to sell and renew. No-show rates at games are increasing. Teams are struggling to monetize the growth in social networking and all forms of new media. Team owners are asking their business-operations executives where the new revenue will be coming from. There are no easy answers.

The huge payday of legalized betting on the Big Four sports leagues won't happen in our lifetime, although NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has launched a trial balloon over the past few months to see what the public reaction would be.

Will teams and leagues allow corporate names on their uniforms? Yes, check that one off, starting with training camp and practice, with the NBA moving into full logo mania. Major League Soccer has been bold enough to follow the example set by international soccer teams. Are we looking at a day in the future when we will hear "The General Electric Basketball League is proud to present tonight's game between the Tesla Warriors and the General Motors Pistons"? Yes, that day is coming.

The next significant new revenue source for professional sports could be ... virtual.

Teams have the ability to package significant pieces of inventory and benefits into virtual yet tangible off-site season tickets on a platform constructed to generate unmined revenue without cannibalizing existing team profit centers.

There are tens of millions of fans devoted to 122 North American professional teams who will never set foot in the home venue. According to Navigate Research, the market of fans who are very interested or somewhat interested in the Big Four sports are as follows: NFL: 83 million fans; MLB: 59 million; NBA: 41 million; and NHL: 21 million. There are over 200 million fans interested in following their favorite teams, yet only 3.2 million have season tickets.

The reasons that keep fans from attending home games of their favorite teams are varied:

* Geography

* Affordability

* Time

* Lifestyle choices

* Ticket availability

* Free TV

* Pay TV

* New media

* Video games

* Fantasy leagues

* Accessibility

* Mobile applications

* Growing sophistication of interactive technology

* Enhanced TV: HD,3-D

What is a VST?

It's a season ticket structured to experience everything that happens in and around the game. The VST (Virtual Studio Technology) holder will be taking the trip to and from the venue through a virtual platform, experiencing the live environment during the season without actually being at the venue.

Advances in technology, interactivity, 3-D TV, video games, social gaming, mobile applications, video streaming and virtual spectatorship can bring VST holders into the stadium environment in an enhanced virtual yet tangible manner without actually being there or spending thousands of dollars on tickets.

Think of the current market of season-ticket-holder benefits as hundreds of pick-up sticks. The VST will bring order to this chaos. There will be a matrix of inventory that fans will be able to buy as part of virtual season-ticket packages that can open up a significant new revenue stream to professional sports teams.

Size of market

The four major professional sports attracted a combined audience of 150 million fans to their venues in 2014. That number includes season-ticket holders, partial season-ticket holders, groups, single-game purchasers and suite holders.

Teams keep their real number of full season-ticket equivalents (FSEs) under lock and key. The total number of account holders is less than the gross number of season tickets. There is a duplication factor inherent in fans attending multiple times and being season-ticket holders of multiple teams in a market. The numbers for season-ticket holders for each of the four major sports are as follows:

NFL:  32 teams averaging 68,000 FSEs --  2,176,000 season tickets

MLB:  30 teams averaging 16,000 FSEs -- 480,000 season tickets

NBA:  30 teams averaging 8,800 FSEs -- 264,000 season tickets

NHL:  30 teams averaging 10,000 FSEs -- 300,000 season tickets

TOTAL:  3,220,000 season-ticket holders

There is a multibillion-dollar market of spending from pro sports teams' fans that isn't being effectively marketed. By creating a unique proprietary service-product offering through one-stop shopping, teams and leagues will be able to create a new revenue pool that can break the stagnating revenue trend in pro sports.

The future

Virtual season-ticket packages will be scalable so that significant new revenue can flow to the rights holders.

I have sat on the other side of the table from today's vendors and entrepreneurs who are pitching various unconnected bits-and-pieces components of this virtual puzzle. No single entity is effectively addressing the matrix concept of the VST. Companies are trying to get teams to buy their products with promises of additional revenue or greater insight into existing fan behavior. At this point the market activation has many spokes but no hub. A strong Virtual Season Ticket product will capture new fans with their prized demographic information and provide a quantum leap in activating the virtual fan into a new revenue producer.

The days of the little piece of cardboard known as a ticket are slowly disappearing. As we peer around the corner, the VST could become just the ticket.

Longtime sports executive Andy Dolich has more than three decades of experience in the professional sports industry, mostly spent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This includes stints in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. He operates his consulting business, Dolich & Associates, in Los Altos. 

It's Never the Act -- It's Always the Cover-Up Pete Elman

As if I needed one, now I have yet another reason to hate Tom Brady. I just finished reading the first 139 pages of the Wells report; the last 100 pages are technical and statistical gobbledygook. (I know, I need to get a life, but the journalist in me demands that I know whereof I speak.) Once again, truth is stranger than fiction.

You can't put this one on coach Bill Belichick, no matter how much you might want to, no matter how many priors the Hoodie has; that is, in addition to Spygate, where the league fined him half a million bucks while docking owner Bob Kraft $250,000 and a No. 31 draft choice. Chump change for these guys. Did that stop them from winning the Super Bowl this year?

No, this one is on the golden boy, the Peninsula's own fair-haired Joe Montana 2.0, who honed his skills on the fields of Silicon Valley and parlayed what seemed to be average talent at Michigan into four championships. Except Joe never cheated, at least as far as we know. And guess what? Before you even get to page 10, there they are, in print, the revealing text messages from Jim McNally, a.k.a. the "deflator," for the past 32 years a part-time employee of the Patriots, whose job description as the officials' locker room attendant is not supposed to, but invariably does, include handling game balls, and, in this case, dropping f-bombs.

"Tom sucks," McNally texts, and then "F- Tom," several times, as he's conniving with Patriots equipment assistant John Jastremski to extort some free shoes and autographs out of Brady in exchange for deflating footballs, thus making it easier for Brady to throw those incredibly accurate lasers he's been killing teams with the past 14 years.

I heard snippets of Brady's interview with Jim Gray at Salem State University last Thursday, in front of a room packed with Patriots fans cheering everything Tom said. His answers to Gray's softballs were boringly predictable, but wait -- did I detect a chink in the armor? A shard of contrition? A teeny bit of concern that he might get suspended for a couple of games? That he might receive a (meaningless) fine? Nahh ... he couldn't care less. After all, he's Tom freakin' Brady, the all-American boy.

Let's not parse words. There are volumes of damning evidence in this report that contradict Brady's lies about not being involved. With every page comes stuff that points to a longstanding agreement between Brady, McNally and Jastremski about how Brady likes his footballs, and what indiscretions the other two would regularly implement to enable those demands.

Now one could rebut that the Colts game was a 45-7 blowout, so who cares? I care ... about the integrity of the game, the same way I care that Pete Rose bet on -- and probably against -- his Reds team for years (I also read the Dowd Report in its entirety, thank you); the same way I care that Lance Armstrong lied for years, leaving ruined careers and lives in his wake.

Before game day the Colts brass had contacted the NFL, stating their concern that the Patriots, who were long suspected of such chicanery, would attempt to use underinflated balls. All they wanted was "a level playing field." And referee Walt Anderson, a respected 19-year NFL official, inspects the balls himself before every game. So the great deception -- having McNally take the ball bag into the bathroom (captured on video) after Anderson checked the balls right before game time -- is the smoking gun. So much for the level playing field.

Brady, it is clear, lied about his involvement deflating the balls. He also blatantly lied about even knowing McNally. The report states that Brady, having not contacted McNally for at least six months before this incident, engaged in repeated calls and texts with him immediately after the Colts game. The list just goes on and on. What about the Patriots? Complicit. Guilty. They even tried to throw the NFL officials who tested the balls under the bus, saying they were to blame.

And do not for one minute think I will spare the mobsters who run the NFL my wrath. I have a question for these entitled, martini-swigging billionaires who are making money faster than they can count it, who secretly cheer every time another player -- in this case 49er linebacker Ahmad Brooks -- is busted for sexual assault. They crave the publicity. Do not think for a second that they care about women's rights, or "playing with class" (that's a good one, Jed).

My question is this, fellas: If you knew at halftime of the Pats-Colts game (which you did, according to the report) that all 11 of the Patriots footballs, which weighed in legally before the game, were now underinflated, then why in the hell did you not do anything then? Wait, I'll answer that. It's the money, stupid, the unholy cabal between the NFL and the networks, a deal made with the devil decades ago by Pete Rozelle which insured the hegemony of our violent national pastime. Nothing shall get in the way of that gold mine, certainly not sportsmanship.

Not only did the league not say anything during the game about the cheating, they had to wait three months before they trotted out an "investigation" that is whitewashed before it even gets dirty. But hey, doesn't this show they're serious about getting it right? Hardly. They have thrown millions at this, and when the dust settles nothing will change -- not that smug expression on Roger Goodell's mug, not the ratings that are going through the roof, and surely not football's stranglehold on the American sports psyche. And nobody would dare try to pry that fourth Lombardi trophy from Tom Brady's mitts.

So why am I so incensed? Hey, the balls were legit when they beat the Seahawks in the Super Bowl, right? That's not the point. It's about playing by the rules. Just come clean, Tom: say you cheated and you lied, and face the music. It's never the act, it's always the cover-up, and this is no different. Confess, and Americans will probably forgive you. We always do.

But it's not all bad. The ghosts of the Tuck Rule Game have tortured me since that fateful January day in the snow at Foxboro. Now, 13 years later, I and thousands of inconsolable Raiders fans are exacting just a little bit of payback. Twist in the wind, Tom ...

Pete Elman worked as a sportswriter for the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune from 2000 to 2011. In 1991 he came up with the iconic moniker "RUN TMC" for the Golden State Warriors of the early 1990s. He is currently publishing a children's picture book with music entitled "Seasons, Rhymes In Time"(chillincrowbooks.com).

  Odds to win the 2014-15 NBA championship

  Highly Recommended! 

 Artichoke Joe's 

659 Huntington Avenue, San Bruno, CA

(650) 589-8812

www.artichokejoes.com

  Odds to win the 2015 World Series

Ultimate Sports Guide copies are available!

Have an upcoming special event or festival and would like a sensational handout? Copies of the Ultimate Sports Guide are available at NO charge for special occasions, such as basketball tournaments, sports camps, fairs, exhibitions, games, coaching clinics, openings, etc. If you need 25, 50, 100 or more free copies for your fans or participants, write: theultimatesportsguide@gmail or

call (510) 845-2035.

(A nominal postage or delivery fee will apply.)   

There are 272 days left until the Golden Super Bowl at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, on Feb. 7, 2016.

Advertise in Sports Today!   *  Reach thousands of fans on a     weekly basis *  Economical rates *  Sponsorship opportunities

Call (510) 414-5394 or write

[email protected]

Sports bars we recommend visiting or living in

Below is a list of sports bars we recommend for all your sports viewing needs. Each is a worthy institution and they have the added distinction of also being long-time Ultimate Sports Guide advertisers. When you stop in, please extend our thanks.